It might sound crazy to say that instructors could help solve our college loan crisis. But by focusing students on a cost-effective course of study and on-time graduation, they could make a big difference.

Wikimedia Commons

Every Saturday morning at 9:00, Lisa tutors my 10-year old son. With her round smiling face, Lisa draws him into his books and holds a bookmark under the words to keep his eyes from jumping ahead in the text. Lisa wants to be a special education teacher. I imagine she'll be very good at it, once she finishes her undergraduate education.

Lisa still has another three years of college, despite the fact that she's been in school full time for five years. All those years in college have been very expensive -- tuition, room and board, books, transportation, as well as years lost earning a salary. Although she's now living at home to save money, she's facing at least $30,000 in debt, which will take a long time to pay off with a teacher's salary.

Lisa is not alone. She is part of the Student Loan Generation. Two-thirds of college seniors graduated with loans in 2010, and they carried an average of $25,250 in debt.

Are colleges - and faculty in particular -- doing enough to help students earn their BA's with a limited amount of debt? I tried to chip away at this huge question by talking to several faculty advisors over the summer.

At most schools, students are required to meet with an assigned faculty member every year. Faculty help students choose their majors, take the required courses in the correct sequence, and plan for the future. This is the primary interaction that students have with grown-ups during their college years. In very large, research-oriented colleges, an administrator may take on this role.

Faculty said they could do little to help students manage their finances. Nevertheless, student loans were addressed indirectly during their meetings. Several schools had instituted reforms that could be scaled up. And it was also clear that students, particularly untraditional students at non-elite schools, needed more help than advisors were able to provide.

THE L-WORD

With the tremendous amount of media and political attention focused on the national student debt burden, you would think that loans would be an omnipresent discussion between faculty and students. Surprisingly, faculty said that they rarely discuss money matters during their annual meetings.

Faculty did not encourage a discussion of loans, because they did not feel qualified to talk about financial decisions. They said that their training was in anthropology or biology, not financial management.

Mike Unger, a political science professor at Ramapo College, said, "Faculty are not trained financial advisors. I can't provide specifics. We know very little about our students' finances. Hopefully, there are people on campus who do that."

Others say that information about finances is highly personal, and that conversations like this could easily cross professional lines.

Timothy Burke, a history professor at Swarthmore College, said, "The faculty are leery about getting into the underpinnings about a student's finances once they get here. It gets into the social class situation of the student. The student could get offended. If it doesn't offend them, then you can get saddled with a sense of responsibility. Your heart gets broken, but there isn't much you can do about it. You get entangled in the life of the student. For the most part, the faculty does not want to know how the sausage gets made."

Burke added that student loan debt wasn't a pressing issue at his school, because the school had enough resources to subsidize tuition for needy students.

Faculty advisors also said that student loan information is not directly addressed during office hours, because the students themselves rarely bring it up. Many students are not aware of their debt load and are not thinking about life after college. One administrator told me that loans were "not on their radar."

My discussion with our tutor, Lisa, confirmed that observation. She could not tell me exactly how much she currently owed. She did not know whether her loans were accruing interest while she was in school. She said that she never initiated a discussion about finances with her advisors.

STAYING ON TIME

Faculty said that they helped students manage their loan debt indirectly by encouraging them to graduate on time. Students who spend less time in school should rack up fewer loans and have more time in the workforce to repay their debts.

Jo Anne Huber, an administrator in charge of undergraduate advisement at the University of Texas at Austin, said that improving the four-year graduate rate is a priority at her school. Only 50 percent of students there finish in four years, which has contributed to an over-crowding problem.

Huber said that students take too long to graduate for a variety reasons. Some students work outside of school, which makes it difficult for them to take a full course load every semester. Other students major in multiple subjects, which they believe will give them an edge in a competitive job market. Huber discouraged this practice. She also said that students sometimes made poor choices, like choosing to spend an extra semester at college in order to enjoy another season of football.

The University of Texas at Austin has instituted various reforms to increase their four-year graduation rate, which may indirectly lead to lower student loan burdens. They have flat rate tuitions to encourage students to take a full course load. Students can monitor their progress through an online program. They provide four-year degree plans, which enable students to do better long term planning.

LOST YEARS, LOST CREDITS

Lisa's lengthy stay in college and her subsequent debt is the result of changing majors and transferring colleges multiple times.

She began her college education at Johnson & Wales in Rhode Island where she earned an Associates degree in fashion after two years. After deciding that fashion wasn't the right career choice for herself, she transferred to Rhode Island College and began a degree in Elementary Education with a specialty in Special Education. She stayed at Rhode Island College for 1-1/2 years, and then moved home to New Jersey to save money. She transferred to William Paterson University. William Paterson would not accept most of her credits from her previous two colleges. She finished three semesters of college, and she needs at least five more semesters of classes in order to graduate.

Huber said that accepting credits from other schools is a problem, especially when the classes come from an out-of-state college, because credit hours and class expectations vary so widely. Reforms have been made to enable transfers between in-state schools easier, but transfers between out-of-state schools continue to be a problem. Faculty members have little control over these matters.

FUTURE PLANS

In some cases, faculty advisors address student loan debt when it pertains to future career choices. Nobody wants to see kids like Lisa make drastic career changes, which leads to extra time in school.

At Swarthmore College, freshmen must write an essay that aligns their educational plans with their future career goals. Students struggle with this project, which requires long-term thinking. Few eighteen-year olds can imagine life beyond the next dorm party on Friday night. Burke believes that this essay is a useful exercise to force kids to think about their educational choices.

Other advisors tell their students not to attend terminal masters programs that do not have an obvious professional benefit. Unger speaks with students about the costs of law programs and encourages students to do the math. Both Burke and Unger told students not to attend PhD programs that do not provide generous stipends. In a few cases, they have dissuaded students from attending graduate school altogether.

RECOMMENDATIONS

College debt is not spread out equally among all students. It is concentrated in certain colleges, such as the for-profit schools. It is also concentrated in certain populations. Kids without top SAT scores, which open doors to well funded colleges, those without financial resources from home, or those who families lack higher education experience are particularly vulnerable. These students are in dire need of advice.

I also believe that untraditional students need more guidance about making higher education decisions. Faculty advisors and administrators do provide some guidance to kids like Lisa about finances -- sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. A few schools have genuinely innovative reforms that should be replicated. However, students need more help than individual faculty can provide.

Students need administrators, high school counselors, or outside groups to provide them with a cocktail of career, education, and finance advice. They need to understand the penalties that are involved with transferring schools and changing majors. They should meet with the financial aid office, understand the totality of their loans, and know whether or not interest is accruing. Decisions about majors, careers, and universities should be undertaken with care.

It is not clear what can be done about students who do foolish things like extend their college loans to get access to football tickets, or students who are too immature to think about life beyond the next frat party. Some students will not listen to good advice, even if it is readily available.

Colleges should provide more thorough, regular, and comprehensive help for students. Though we can't force students to make responsible decisions and other reforms are certainly needed, greater guidance for students is a necessity.

Most Popular

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

This article is from the archive of our partner .

We can all agree that Millennials are the worst. But what is a Millennial? A fight between The New York Times and Slate inspired us to try and figure that out.

After the Times ran a column giving employers tips on how to deal with Millennials (for example, they need regular naps) (I didn't read the article; that's from my experience), Slate's Amanda Hess pointed out that the examples the Times used to demonstrate their points weren't actually Millennials. Some of the people quoted in the article were as old as 37, which was considered elderly only 5,000 short years ago.

The age of employees of The Wire, the humble website you are currently reading, varies widely, meaning that we too have in the past wondered where the boundaries for the various generations were drawn. Is a 37-year-old who gets text-message condolences from her friends a Millennial by virtue of her behavior? Or is she some other generation, because she was born super long ago? (Sorry, 37-year-old Rebecca Soffer who is a friend of a friend of mine and who I met once! You're not actually that old!) Since The Wire is committed to Broadening Human Understanding™, I decided to find out where generational boundaries are drawn.